


red sky at morning

by laughingalonewithducks



Category: Storm Hawks
Genre: Gen, Paranoia, a suspicious amount of eyeliner, air chilli, land sharks, stork-typical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 02:09:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12949035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingalonewithducks/pseuds/laughingalonewithducks
Summary: Stork would never survive on the inside. It's a good thing, then, that he's not inside.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kanaynays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanaynays/gifts).



> this is not a gift but a finger of blame. irma got me into this and now you all have to deal with old cartoon fic

It takes nearly eight hours for the Hawks to notice Stork is missing - eight hours, as Stork would put it, in which he might have suffered through all sorts of horrific trials and tribulations. By now, he's probably dead of starvation, or elephantitis, or a bog-howler attack, or-

"Calm  _down,_ " says Piper. "He's probably back at the diner."

Stork is not back at the diner. According to the servers, he was never  _at_ the diner in the first place.

Clearly this can only mean one thing: he's fallen off the side of the terra.

"Finn," Aerrow says, clearly exasperated. "Stork might not be here to be paranoid at us but that doesn't mean you need to do it for him."

Finn continues to wail. 

Aerrow sighs. "Are we  _sure_ he hasn't fallen asleep in a corner somewhere?"

"I've checked everywhere," Junko says mournfully. "Even his- his  _room_." 

Junko's face goes briefly slack as he shivers in remembered horror. He's not even scared of spiders, but there's a world of difference between squishing one in the jungle and having to edge his way past a tank full of them as they pick over something freshly dead.

The things he does for Stork, honestly.

Aerrow considers this for a minute. "Alright," he says, eventually. "Piper, get on the radio and see if anyone's seen him. Junko, keep up the maintenance work - Radarr and I will be piloting the ship until we find Stork, and I have a feeling we're going to need you just to keep the Condor aloft. Finn... if we get air chilli, will you stop freaking out?"

Finn calms down almost immediately.

(If he sniffles a little while pinning up flyers on the bounty board, no-one mentions it.)

* * *

Stork wakes up with a pounding headache - either a symptom of the dreaded jungle pox, or a sign he's been knocked out. Honestly, he's not sure which is worse.

"You're awake," says a voice to his left. It seems... vaguely familiar. 

He sits up as best he can - his head is  _throbbing_ \- and takes in his surroundings: an iron cage, poorly made, with bars so far apart that an exceptionally small human could probably squeeze between them. He's never been overly envious of humans before, but apparently today is a day for trying new things.

Beyond the cage is a heavily overgrown jungle, populated with huge mosquitoes -  _ugh_ \- and, predictably, Cyclonians. Which means he probably has jungle pox  _and_ a concussion. Wonderful.

"Are you okay?" the voice asks. Its owner is a small, spindly human girl. A fellow prisoner, then, or - no, she's wearing entirely too much eyeliner. A plant. 

"I'm... Luc," the girl continues, as if Stork gives a shit what her name is. "Do you remember yours? That was a pretty nasty job they did on you."

"Stork," he mutters, hoping she'll get the hint and quiet down. She's a plant, she probably already knows his name. It's not like it matters.

Luc offers him a sympathetic smile, and Stork hates her for it. They're in  _cages_ in a  _jungle_ , facing  _certain death_ , and she's smiling? Definitely a plant.

He says as much to her, and she laughs at him - not a real laugh, but a polite one; one that says she has no idea what he's on about.

"It's the heat," Luc says. "Don't let it get to you."

 _Merbs are reptilian,_ Stork doesn't say. This place is so warm it could be a holiday destination, if it wasn't so humid and full of bugs and death and disease and... strange tracks?

They're not tracks so much as long, shallow grooves in the dirt, made by something pointed, like a tail or a claw or, well, a fin. Specifically, the kind of fins that belong to land sharks, which are only found on Terra Arbor: the single most uninhabitable place in Atmos, aside from the Wasteland. How the Cyclonians managed to colonise it Stork isn't sure, and nor does he particularly care, because -

"I'm going to die," he says, out loud. "Between the Cyclonians and the land sharks and the  _jungle pox_... I'm not getting off this terra alive."

The prospect of his untimely death, now that the hour is upon him, is a lot less frightening than he'd thought it'd be - in fact, it's quite freeing. 

He drags himself over to the cage door and fiddles with the lock, ignoring the odd look Luc shoots him. If he's going to die, he might as well take a couple Cyclonians with him.


	2. Chapter 2

"That lock's pretty tough," Luc observes as Stork prods at it. "I should know, I've already had a go at it."

She's right - it's a huge, black hunk of iron; clearly more for aesthetic purposes than for actual locking purposes, but it's solid enough to do the job. The  _hinges_ , though, are just as shitty as the rest of the cage; a rushed production with minimal resources. Stork manages to pull the pins out with very little effort, and the whole door slides silently off its hinges when he lifts it.

"Are all Merbs this strong?" Luc asks suddenly, voice echoing off the trees like a gunshot. Stork jumps so high he nearly brains himself on the roof, shrieks very quietly, and yanks the door back into place before the guard sees him.

He shoots a glare at Luc, who raises an eyebrow expectantly. 

Stork makes a vague motion with his hand, partly because he's been away from Merbia for so long that he doesn't actually remember, but mostly because he's not telling her jack shit. Luc settles back down, clearly unsatisfied, and Stork waits for the guard to turn away again. 

Luc continues to interrupt his escape attempts for the rest of the afternoon, asking about everything from the logo on his back to his hobbies, but especially about his friends. It's such a blatant attempt at fishing for information that Stork doesn't bother trying to answer them, preferring to huddle in the corner and look defeated instead.

It's fine. Night is falling soon, and even highly suspicious humans need sleep.

Stork, who at this point has been sleep-deprived for so long that he wouldn't know what to do with a good night's rest if he got one, settles in for a long wait, keeping an eye out for horned sky-wasps as he curls up into a strategically-advantageous ball of pathetic-looking Merb. They're known to be particularly numerous in jungle areas, and all his repellent is on the Condor.

* * *

"Have you heard anything?" Aerrow asks, for approximately the fifteenth time that day.

Piper sighs at him. "If I had, I would've said something."

"I know, I know, but we're reaching critical mass here."

"It's been  _two days_."

Aerrow scrubs at his face, exhausted. "Finn saw a squeaky rubber chicken and nearly burst into tears today."

Piper muffles a snort. "Is that 'cause Stork, you know..." She mimics Stork's classic 'rictus of fear' grimace.

"He bought it and now he and Junko are taking turns to make it squeak."

"That's... sweet. Kind of concerning, but sweet."

Aerrow looks completely unimpressed. "It's the single most miserable thing I've ever seen. We need to find Stork, Piper."

"I  _know_ ," Piper says. "I've been monitoring every single radio frequency I can access and just- nothing. If anyone knows something, they're not telling."

Aerrow squeezes her shoulder. "Sorry I keep bugging you," he says. "We'll find something eventually."

Piper snorts and goes back to hovering over the radio.

* * *

After counting her breaths for nearly an hour, Stork slips out of his cage, finally convinced Luc is asleep.

She's probably been asleep for ages, but it pays to make sure. It also pays to make sure the guard is dead, crumpled in a heap under the thorny vines of a drakefruit tree, where he can't notice the missing prisoner and alert his colleagues.

He picks his way through the jungle, noting each separate Cyclonian campsite - and shit, there's a lot of them. Stork might just have found where Cyclonis has been hiding all those highly expendable henchmen.

It's too bad, really, that they've picked such a flat, low area to camp in. Stork may not know a whole lot about things like terraforming, but even he can divert a river, and land sharks happen to like the really fast ones.


	3. Chapter 3

See, the thing about land sharks - the thing that isn't particularly well known, even though their cousins in the sky and the sea have entire libraries of information on them - is that land sharks don't actually  _live_ on land. They're semi-aquatic; they spend their entire larval stage underwater, and the adults only emerge from the river to hunt. Or so says Sir Reginald Huntington III, moderately-respected academic and notorious tin-hatter.

Like most sharks, they don't particularly enjoy human flesh, but Stork isn't bothered - he needs the river the tracks are coming from. As far as he's concerned, any mauled Cyclonians are just a bonus.

The river is wide, fast-flowing, and deep. Stork hops across on some conveniently-placed rocks and tries not to scream as the water laps at his toes. He shrieks a little, but the jungle is so noisy that it's lost in the cacophony of howling and hooting that drifts down from the treetops.

It's apparently mating season for bog howlers. Lovely.

Once over on the other side of the river, Stork sets to work, dragging every fallen log and rock he can find into the path of the river. The guard shift changes soon, and he doesn't have much more time before someone notices he's gone.

* * *

"Aerrow, we have to land," says Junko.

Aerrow blinks. "Do we  _really_ have to?"

Junko nods thoughtfully. "You're right," he says. "Let me rephrase that: we're gonna land at some point in the near future, because the engine's hot enough to boil water on."

"...Ah." Aerrow turns back to the helm. "Can we make it to that outcrop over there?"

Junko shrugs eloquently. "We can try."

* * *

Stork plods back to the river, dragging a small tree behind him - he's run out of debris, and has turned to wanton logging behaviour - and finds a bog howler peering suspiciously at his makeshift dam. The bog howler has its back to him, so Stork begins to cautiously edge back the way he came, and then a shrub behind him rustles ominously and out steps an entire Cyclonian patrol.

Stork is an  _idiot_. 

Of  _course_ they'd have patrols out past the river. It's a jungle of death and doom and homicidal animals, for fuck's sake.

A guard shouts at him to halt, the bog howler spins around, and Stork does what he does best: he screams and runs for the nearest tree.

It's lucky for him that bog howlers don't like Cyclonians any more than he does, because otherwise he'd be in trouble. As it is, though, once the carnage is over all he needs to do is brain the survivor with a rock, and then he's home free. 

For the time being, anyway.

Stork shoves the bog howler and the patrol guards into the dam. It's surprisingly effective.


	4. Chapter 4

Piper slams the bridge door open, waving a printout. 

"I've  _found_ something!" she shouts. "Cyclonians! Terra Arbor!  _Why aren't we moving?"_

"Crud," says Aerrow. "Junko, can you-"

"Already on it," Junko says, carrying their new fridge down to the engine room.

"What?" Piper says.

"We've overheated," Aerrow says. "We're not moving for a while - tell us what you found."

"Right, right." Piper shoves the printout at Aerrow; it's covered in shorthand and phrases that might say 'Cyclonian colony' but might also say 'bicycle baloney'.

 Aerrow reflects, not for the first time, that bartering their oven for Piper's birthday present - a sketchy dictation crystal - might not have been a particularly good idea after all.

"Cyclonians have been spotted moving  _tons_ of equipment and food into Terra Arbor," Piper says, gesturing to a wonky circle that might be a map of sorts. There's a big red X marked on one side, and Piper taps it insistently. 

"They've got an entire colony down there, Aerrow," she says, "and three days ago they brought in a whole lot of cages."

"Not that I don't believe you," Aerrow says, "but did anyone actually see Stork?"

Piper looks away. So that's a no, then.

"We should investigate it anyway," Aerrow says. "It can't hurt."

Piper sighs. "I'll go help Junko with the engine. If he's really there... we need to hurry."

* * *

Dawn breaks over Terra Arbor, bathing the jungle in crimson.

 _Appropriate_ , Stork thinks, and shoves the final tree into place. 

The river breaks its banks with a roar, spilling over the embankment and down into the camp, crumpling tents as it goes.

Stork follows after it, keeping to the edges and away from the powerful undertow that's uprooting trees like so many toothpicks. He hops over a felled tree, skirts an eddy - is that blood swirling inside, or torn cloth? Doesn't matter; whatever it is is trapped - and peels off towards the shipyard. A helpful sign points the way, as if he couldn't follow the well-trodden,  _obvious_ trail up the hill by himself. 

He catches a glimpse of the cages as he heads up to the yard and, just as he suspected, Luc is gone. He's pretty sure her cage was never even locked in the first place. Even if it was, the massive hole in it now would've let her out regardless.

Behind him, the river spreads over the campsite, knocking guards off their feet and stirring up the soil just enough that - while  _technically_ still only a flood - it looks enough like an actual bog that the bog howlers in the trees sit up and take notice.

A  _lot_ of notice.

Stork pauses in his panicky ascent for long enough to survey the carnage and cackle, the way a proper escapee always should. An escape plan isn't a real escape plan without a bit of drama, after all.

* * *

"Get to the ships!" a nameless Cyclonian employee bellows.

His colleagues don't appear to hear him. This is because most of them are dead, dying, or paralysed with fear.

The nameless Cyclonian employee allows himself a moment of pure, unfiltered regret at his choices in life, and then he makes a break for the trail and its helpful little sign.

The last thought that runs through his mind before the over-large hand of a bog howler closes about his head is,  _that looks like an explosion._


	5. Chapter 5

It's an explosion.

A very, very large explosion, because there are - _were_ \- a lot of ships in the shipyard, and a lot of ship fuel, and Stork is nothing if not exceedingly good at jerry-rigging all kinds of things to do what he needs them to do - which, in this case, is explode.

He saves a single skimmer from the explosion, and it's not until he's halfway off the ground that he realises he's not going to die here.

Naturally, he panics and nearly crashes the stolen skimmer right back into the former shipyard.

It's not that he can't find the Condor - he's had a tracking device on it since that time he left Finn at the helm while he bargained for parts down at Terra Saharr and Finn immediately forgot how to navigate - but the bog howlers sound like they're getting closer, and  _wow_ , he forgot how flimsy skimmers were, what if he meets a patrol over the terra and gets shot down? 

And that isn't even mentioning the jungle pox he's still convinced he has - his headache's gone, but that's just another symptom. He's going to turn yellow and experience massive pulmonary haemorrhage any minute now.

There's only one thing for it - he has to grit his teeth and bear it, and fly back to the Condor without vomiting most of his internal organs over the side of the skimmer - but he's not going to like it. 

He's  _really_ not going to like it. 

Is his hand going yellow? There's definitely a tinge to it. 

* * *

"Full speed ahead, Radarr!" Aerrow cries, and then: "Ah, crap, swerve!  _Swerve!_ " 

The Condor does a clumsy barrel roll out of the path of an equally clumsy skimmer, clips the back of it and rolls right side up just in time for the rapidly disintegrating skimmer to crash through the garage door.

"Junko, Piper, check on that," Aerrow orders, and they sprint back down the corridor.

The Condor holds steady - Terra Arbor is almost in sight - and then Piper shouts "Stork!" over the comms. 

"What?" says Aerrow. "We're nearly at the terra, yeah, but-"

"No," Piper says. "On the skimmer! It's Stork!"

"Oh,  _man_ ," Finn says, and he and Radarr bolt for the garage.

Aerrow grabs the helm, and then stands there awkwardly for a minute or two. "So," he says over the comms, "are we still going to Terra Arbor?"

The bridge doors slide open, and Stork staggers in. He doesn't look particularly bad off - he's not injured, or any gaunter than usual - but the entire crew of the Condor is wrapped around him. Finn is hugging his leg, and might be crying.

"We are  _never_ going to Terra Arbor," Stork declares, waving his one free hand dramatically. "Look at me! I'm  _yellow_ _!_ "

He's the same green he's always been, but Aerrow wisely keeps his mouth shut.

Stork drags the rest of the squadron - who still refuse to let go of him - over to the helm so he can hug it. "I thought I'd  _never see you again_ ," he wails at it. "Why is there a rubber chicken taped to you? Actually, don't tell me. I don't want to know."

Finn goes suspiciously quiet at this.

Aerrow shifts awkwardly, and Stork flails a skinny arm at him. "Get  _over_ here already," he says irritably. "Might as well make it a group hug."

"Also," he adds, after they've attempted to murder him with affection, "you all have jungle pox now. It's incurable."

**Author's Note:**

> Hey Remember That Time Stork Murdered Every Single Raptor With His Bare Hands And Wasnt Even Bothered
> 
> anyway i have a desperate need for more badass stork in my life, @cartoon network Season Three When


End file.
